SPECIAL TRIBUTE: GRETCHEN VON LOWE KREUTER ’55

SPECIAL TRIBUTE: GRETCHEN VON LOWE KREUTER ’55 (1942-2022)

“You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So … get on your way!”

Gretchen Von Lowe Kreuter, Ph.D., selected those triumphant final exclamations from Dr. Seuss’, “Oh the Places You’ll Go” to conclude her Rockford College commencement remarks of 1992, placing a coda on her tenure as the institution’s 14th president. Hired just five years earlier to help deliver the college from the throes of crippling debt, she had certainly come to know a thing or two about the figurative mountains that loom over everyone’s horizons.

Gretchen first arrived at Rockford College in 1951 with her trademark smile and irrepressible sense of humor. A Minneapolis native, she had received a scholarship to study German. While matriculating, her interest turned to global affairs. She graduated in 1955 as student body president and a member of Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in International Relations.

During graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW), Gretchen traversed the uneven foothills of academia, facing the difficulty for a woman to balance those pursuits with a co-equal desire to have a family alongside her history-professor husband. In 1960, she gave birth to their son, David, while simultaneously earning her M.A. and Ph.D. in history. In 1965, their daughter Betsy was born. Along the way, Gretchen secured teaching appointments at several colleges. During that time, among other accomplishments, she co-authored an award-winning book, developed the women’s studies program at St. Olaf College, and was the founding president of WHOM (Women Historians of the Midwest).

By 1980, she had quietly amassed an impressive resume of project management and strategic planning. Over the next seven years, she coupled those skills with a burning desire to be a college president. She served as assistant to the president of St. Olaf, followed by the assistant to the vice president for academic affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Meanwhile, at her alma mater, things were not going well. In an eight-year effort to distinguish itself, the college had taken an aggressive posture relative to its peers — purchasing the leasehold of a brick-and-mortar campus (Regents University) in London, UK while simultaneously developing undergraduate programs in engineering and nursing along with a graduate program in business. When the dust had settled, the college was left with a $10 million debt and insufficient means to bridge the gap. Gretchen was hired to help the college move forward. In a hybrid model that included fundraising, faculty/staff reductions, budget cuts, the liquidation of 70 acres of land around the perimeter of campus, and the sale of Regents University, the debt was cut to $4 million. Having given all she could in the face of such adversity, Gretchen stepped down. The wounds were deep, but the future of RU has been secured.

Though she expressed a desire to take a well-deserved break, Gretchen was immediately drafted into a one-year presidency at Olivet College in July 1992. There, she ran into a real Everest — hard to climb, impossible to get around. Racial unrest that March had lit a tinderbox, tearing at the fabric of the college. She detailed that year and its fallout in a memoir: “Forgotten Promise: Race and Gender Wars on a Small College Campus.” She served one more interim presidency — at the College of St. Mary in Omaha, Nebraska,— before quietly slipping into retirement with her husband, Bob Sutton. She had found the valley of her mountains in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. There, she was content to garden, keep bees, count monarch butterflies and sandhill cranes, become a devotee of the naturalist Aldo Leopold, and many other things that inquisitive and content people do in such bucolic surroundings.

Soon after Bob’s death in 2004, Gretchen relocated to Minnesota, where she lived out the remainder of her life. She kept busy with scholarship and writing, surrounded by family and active in her community up until her death of natural causes on February 1, 2022. She is survived by her children, her brother, Karl, and their families, who are full in the knowledge that while on this Earth, and to borrow from Dr. Seuss, Gretchen “ … joined the highfliers who soared to great heights.”